Approaches to Identity Inquiry: From Objectivism to Activism
An expansive and diverse social science literature has been generated by the decades of inquiry in identity-related issues in intercultural contexts. The literature reveals that the rise of pluralism and the increased salience of identity as an academic concept tend to correspond with a methodological shift among intercultural researchers away from the traditional “disciplinary” research built on the principle of objectivity (or value neutrality) to the ideology-based research of social activism (cf.
Hammersley, 1995; Littlejohn & Foss, 2011). The activist stance is most clearly reflected in what is broadly known as the “critical” approach, one that places the primary emphasis on social change as the primary aim of academic investigation. A growing number of critical intercultural researchers, including those who are associated with cultural studies, postcolonialism, muted group and standpoint theory, and critical pragmatism, and the like, have mounted vigorous arguments to gear research directly to emancipatory political goals of countering White racism at home and Western/American cultural imperialism abroad (e.g., Collier, 2005; Gonzalez & Tanno, 1997; Nakayama & Martin, 1998; Orbe & Spellers, 2005; Tsuda, 1986; Young, 1996).By and large, critical intercultural researchers are united in their opposition to the social scientific theory and research as serving to reproduce the status quo of the dominant ideological construct (Hall, 1989). They characterize the social science research as a universal science that serves as “the beholders of cultural individualism” of European societies whose work “has led to a theory of politics about individual power” neglecting the “battles of cultural politics” (Young, 1996, p. 148). Young (1996) further argues that it is only when one understands “the process through which cultural exclusion and manipulation of identity of culturally different people is carried out in everyday communication,” can one have a clear basis for “effective politics aimed at changing empirically observable mechanisms for the creation of ideology or the assertion of the reality of one culture over another” (p. 29).